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I agree on a) (and god knows It was a bumpy ride when PA was forced down on people too early), but not about b). WHY should an average desktopuser have to read documentation about how to manually set up their sound card driver and mid level sound system with a texteditor??? That is something geeks and sound pros only should ever need to even think about. Average Joe expect sound to always just work, and that is how it should be on a modern system.

^^ This. Its not the mid-90's anywhere, where you have to manually manage IRQ's and the like.

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I do agree. But you're forgetting that ALSA-lib was created to handle all the userspace stuff. ALSA has two parts, one in kernel space, one in user space. PA is trying to replace the user space part of ALSA. It would make more sense to enhance user space ALSA instead of replacing it.

Except that because it isn't just an enhanced ALSA, it can be used on multiple platforms. The added flexibility is a benefit even if it doesn't help Linux users directly and AFAIK there is no downside.

There's two approaches to fixing something. a) try to fix the existing code and b) rewrite the existing code. PA did neither. It just threw another API in there. So when something turns up in PulseAudio that doesn't work well in the future, let's create yet another one. We'll call it NewAwesomeAudio which replaces PulseAudio. And later, when problems with that turn up, we'll go for yet another new API.

No. If there's a problem, fix it.

PulseAudio is a sound server. The whole point of creating it is to abstract away the various sound APIs, hardware, and multimedia backends from each other. This means that in the future when any new number of those are created, they will be invisible to the end user who will continue to use PulseAudio to manage everything.

Can anyone explain to me why Pulseaudio is bad? From what I can see it is an excellent solution to the problem of the Linux audio stack not having feature parity with its commercial bretheren.

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PulseAudio is a sound server. The whole point of creating it is to abstract away the various sound APIs, hardware, and multimedia backends from each other. This means that in the future when any new number of those are created, they will be invisible to the end user who will continue to use PulseAudio to manage everything.

Can anyone explain to me why Pulseaudio is bad? From what I can see it is an excellent solution to the problem of the Linux audio stack not having feature parity with its commercial bretheren.

You yourself wrote up one reason. It's a server, Yet Another Daemon you have to run, wasting resources unneededly.

As for the plethora of other reasons, do read up the 30-page threads pulse causes, CBA to repeat them (and myself).

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To me, Pulse Audio is a well-intentioned piece of software that just doesn't work. I have had close to 0 problems running Alsa and the very instant Ubuntu introduced Pulse Audio, it's been nothing but hell. Not ready for prime time is true. But is it just my bad memories of Pulse Audio? Hardly. To this day, it still gives me hell and I have better things to do than fiddle around with this bullsh*t.

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To me, Pulse Audio is a well-intentioned piece of software that just doesn't work. I have had close to 0 problems running Alsa and the very instant Ubuntu introduced Pulse Audio, it's been nothing but hell. Not ready for prime time is true. But is it just my bad memories of Pulse Audio? Hardly. To this day, it still gives me hell and I have better things to do than fiddle around with this bullsh*t.

1. I've been using PA exclusively since Fedora 9-10 (?) on >10 desktop machines, with zero issues.
This of-course doesn't necessarily negates your experience, but its just as valid.

2. It's time to give it a rest. PA won, Alsa-clean lost. You may enjoy tweaking alsarc and dmix on a per-application basis, but a vast majority of the Linux user-base don't (hence the exponential increase in PA aware distributions and software).
Granted, you may find like-minded people and find PA-free distributions, but in the current rate of affairs, the selection is rather thin and will only get thinner.

As I doubt that you truly believe that repeating the same rant over and over again will cause Ubuntu or Fedora to drop PA (and I'm not talking about you specifically), you're left with one of two options:
1. Learn how to get PA working for you, or 2. start marking preparation to switch to BSD.

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At least in theory, if sufficient number of people dislike the way Linux is moving (PA, Systemd, GNOME 3, KDE4, et al) and decide to do something about it (as opposed to writing hate filled rants [1]), they may be able to fork and maintain the old code.
Problem is - 1. vast majority of users don't seem to mind (They may replace GNOME 3 with KDE or XFCE, but they won't switch distro because they hate PA or systemd), 2. People usually default to empty rants.